Featured was the SWIFT™, a unit designed to save expensive foil and place holograms, tax stamps and brand protection while achieving foil savings of over 90%. Luxury, high value holographic foils were seen, used to prove that foil costs with holographic foil and saving are lower than conventional foiling. Witnessed was also Pantec’s strong environmental awareness: foil was literally left gapless, resulting in a fraction of massively reduced waste.

Further, SWIFT™’s advantages of a short setup time as well as the ability to prepare large part of the job off-line, up front was highly appreciated. The Swiss technology demonstrated five foil streams running hot foils and registered holograms. Granted is a maximum of six stepping servos and larger number of foil streams with the shown standard model. A running speed of 80m/min was achieved with a record foil stepping frequency of 24/sec, maintaining precise control on every hologram to guarantee quality affordably with luxury appeal foiling effects.

Rounding off the three-day event with continual demonstrations left strong impressions and responses from printers and converters at the Labelexpo Americas.

Not present at the show but newly serving semi-rotary markets to deliver optimum printing quality on uncoated and structure papers is Pantec’s RHINO™ flat bed. The in-line hot foil embossing unit is now available combined in Gallus TCS semi–rotary section. The rotating foil head enables innovative, multiple colour designs to be produced directly in-line in one single pass. The Pantec RHINO™ tool cassette immovably holds the cliché and the male mould while its 16 inch long format allows precise registration and highly attractive multistep designs.

The performance of semi–rotary systems is greatly enhanced since it speeds up the press due to cancellation of slowing down the rotary hot foil. In addition overprinting, screen and any other semi-rotary finishing are made possible after RHINO™ 3D embossing, delivering optimal differentiating refining effects.